Social workers see it happen all the time. But no one keeps track of sibling separations and little research exists on their impact. Some small studies, which do not look at the nation as a whole, indicate that between 25 and 75 percent of foster children get separated from their brothers and sisters.

The psychic wounds of those separations, very often involving children who have functioned as parents to their little brothers and sisters and for whom sibling connections are the last vestiges of family that they have, run deep. Child welfare professionals see the emotional fallout but say they are hard-pressed to do anything about it.

The number of children in foster care has ballooned to more than 500,000 while the number of foster home beds has shrunk. And new federal legislation -- the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) -- has created pressure (and financial incentives) to get children into permanent homes as quickly as possible.

"I like adoption, I believe in adoption; lots of children are appropriately and well adopted," says Johnson, who now heads the Kinship Support Network at San Francisco's Edgewood Center for Children and Families. "But ASFA is stripping families.

"Say we have a sibling group and Mama has a new baby. The brother and sister are 6 and 8. The new baby is going to get adopted, and lose his brothers and sisters."

There is no legal guarantee that the brother and sister will know where the new baby has gone or be told why they can't be together. And they may be lost to the new baby, whose adoptive parents may not reveal the existence or whereabouts of siblings.

"I don't know what happened," speculates Christine about her own separation. "I guess they didn't want me to get adopted or I was just too old."

Attempts to establish a constitutional right for children to stay together have been valiant, but futile. Boston attorney Susan Dillard argued for such a right when she represented a 4-year-old boy in a case that ended a year ago. Hugo and his 6-year-old sister, Gloria (not their real names), had been in the same foster home since Hugo was 9 months old. Gloria was adopted by their foster mother, who also wanted to adopt Hugo. Instead, the Massachusetts courts gave custody of Hugo to an aunt in New Jersey.

Dillard asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Hugo's case. She argued that the sibling bond is protected by the 14th Amendment, which forbids any law denying "life, liberty or property" without due process. It is the same amendment that protects the relationship between parent and child.

Hugo and Gloria never got their day in court. The Supreme Court declined the case without comment, and Hugo was shipped to New Jersey. More recently, the justices did take on the now-familiar Troxel case, which questions whether grandparents have a legal right to visits with their grandchildren.

Grown-ups, apparently, have greater protection under the law.

"We're a very adult-focused society," observes Madelyn Freundlich, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, who consulted with Dillard on Hugo's case. "Litigation comes down to the rights of adults and figuring out who has the greatest rights in a particular case.

"In Hugo and Gloria's case, it came down to the respective rights of the foster parent and the biological relative [the aunt]. The sibling relationship is relegated to a lower level of analysis," she adds. But "if we recognize the sibling relationship as a very powerful one, as important as other family relationships, it seems natural to try to sustain it at the highest possible level."

Dillard, who has stayed in touch with Gloria, says the separation has taken a toll. "Gloria was very much a big sister and helped Hugo negotiate the world," she says. "She has had a very hard time [since he left]."

Recently, Dillard says, another foster child who was living with Gloria and her foster mother was moved out. "How come every time I have a brother he gets taken from me?" Gloria asked.

Last April in New York, a 12-year-old girl and her 5-year-old brother slipped away from a foster home in the middle of the night -- the boy on the girl's back -- after social workers started talking about separating them. With the assistance of their mother, whose alleged neglect was the reason for their placement in foster care, they fled to the airport and got to Guatemala, where they live, as fugitives, with relatives. They miss their mother, the girl has told reporters, but cannot go back to visit her for fear of being picked up by the police, sent back to foster care and separated from each other.

"These are sustaining ties," says Barbara Nordhaus, coordinator of child placement and custody at the Yale Child Study Center. "When the system takes a significant and deeply connected sibling relationship and irreparably destroys it, it is a further act of cruelty, a further psychological assault" on a child who has already experienced the loss of parents, home and community.

The children who do manage to remain with their siblings throughout their years in foster care, says Nordhaus, often say that "what saved them was that they had each other. They could cry together under the covers, remember Mom and Dad. There was a sense of not being alone in the world, not being quite so stripped of absolutely everything."

Losing a brother or sister is especially painful for children who come from fragile families where the sibling bond may be the strongest one they have. When parents are gone or incapacitated by drugs, older siblings often step into the breach, caring and looking out for the little ones. If those siblings are later separated, the older ones may see it as their own failure.

One man, now in his 20s, spent his early childhood taking care of several younger brothers and sisters, until Child Protective Services stepped in and broke them up, putting them in separate placements. "I asked for help in finding them," he recalls, "but when it seemed like I was close to locating them, all help disappeared. I kept wondering, were my brothers and sisters going through the same things as me, or worse?

"I'm the oldest and I wasn't there for them."

And yet, according to Kathy Barbell, director of foster care for the Child Welfare League of America, some social workers will intentionally separate siblings in the belief that the older child deserves a chance to "be a child again" without worrying about the younger ones.

It is true, says Nordhaus, that caring for a younger sibling is a heavy burden for a child, but separation is no way to lift it. "If anything goes wrong in the lives of their charges," she says, older siblings often "blame themselves and feel responsible. It can have a devastating impact. When they feel they must save their siblings and they can't, it further compounds their sense of utter helplessness."

Recent Stories